Exhale Slowly And Relax, It’ll Hurt Less…

So after we wrapped up our nano shenanigans down the chain in the C2, we regrouped in Nova to rep up some armor/structure on a few ships. The mood was cheerful, and I was getting ready to send us back down the chain to Feythabolis. Suddenly, someone mic’d up and said “You realize Exhale has a 20 man fleet in Nova right?”

“Say what?!” Order everyone to scramble back to POS and ask for eyes on that fleet. We re-ship to T3 armour DPS and Sonic shotguns triage. We also get on the phone to NorCorp to get back up the chain, bringing our numbers up to something that we were comfortable engaging Exhale. with, assuming they had more than just 20 (which is normal for them). We also sent a CTA to further bolster our ranks.

Now, there’s some backstory here. NorCorp connected to Nova from Polaris (NorCorp home system) earlier that day. They had an op/eviction/something down our chain and wanted to use it. We said “of course” and temp blued them so there wouldn’t be any accidents (I totally almost shot a blue too, I really wanted to). Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, Starbridge connected to Exhale. Then, as fate would have it, Exhale connected to Polaris. Now I wasn’t there but I think the dialogue was something like this.

An Exhale fleet with less than 10 Guardians? So where’s the rest of it? Eyes in Polaris report the rest of the fleet. 6 or so Guardians along with another group of T3s and a bubble up on their connection to Polaris. Total numbers were probably around 30 or so, I don’t actually remember. Once NorCorp, along with a few Temnava guys hits Nova, I call a joint warp to Polaris (we had hopped onto NoHos (NorCorp) comms by now). We land an they start to shoot one of us, but Sonic and Robert land and try to rep. The lock time is slow so one of them drops triage and lands his rep. Meanwhile we drop an Oneiros and a Talos quick. The rest of their fleet has landed in Polaris but they all jump out. A single Guardian who had burned off the hole was left behind to die.

We follow and I call the hold cloak. We wait in silence. NoHo had slipped a Phobos onto their side of the hole and Exhale. now found themselves inside of it. A NoHo triage carrier landed and we all decloak and I begin to call their Guardians primary with a few quick breaks in between for an ECM Tengu and a Falcon. We chew through their Logi with very little problems, having a lot of webs to hold them down and having them inside of 10km to start with helped a lot, I think. Plus Polaris is a Magnetar as well and we all know the story with C6 mags and AHARM.

Regardless, midway through this fight, triage is keeping up with incoming damage and anyone who is getting too low is jumping out back into Nova, where there was a bubble, a dread and two carriers waiting. A scout announces that a Starbridge gang is inbound with Bhaalgorns and something about capitals, either an Archon and 3 Moroses or just the latter. I was really busy calling targets so I’m not entirely sure what was going on but it was just more shit to paint our KB green with as far as I cared. With almost all their logi dead, we start shredding their Legions. Suddenly, a pack of wild Russians appears! Two Bhaalgorns a few more Guardians and some more T3s land. Like a rural Canadian street after a car passed by, it was game on!

We go straight for the Bhaal and he starts to drop but it’s going really slowly and I got super impatient and wanted more explosions so I switched back to Guardians. They started to die in earnest again (maybe if we keep killing them, they’ll get really sad and stop bringing them, 923 primary Guardians e’rry day). Suddenly two NoHo Moroses land and they finish off one of the Bhaals. They also find ANOTHER Exhale CS pilot sitting within 10km of a dread, not moving. BLAP. Down one Abso.

All in all, the allied forces lost two HICs, a Hurricane, a Proteus and an ECM Tengu, totalling ~2.3 billion ISK. Exhale and Starbridge dropped us 4.5 billion in loot alone. Their total losses exceed 30 billion ISK, and a few killmails are not in the main report but are instead here. The phantom capitals from Starbridge never appeared and we held and looted the field.

In closing, gf gf Sheppard

Thanks to everyone, including NorCorp and Temnava for coming together so quickly and making this op go the way we wanted. Great job to everyone in AHARM for following my primaries. Also thanks to my girlfriend who was watching and listening for both fights today and laughed every time I said “get on the hole, no more mass through the hole, get through the hole, etc,” and really laughed when I called “mrparty” as primary.

Props to Exhale and Starbridge for bringing the fight. At least one Exhale pilot stuck in a pod in Nova was escorted out to High Sec after combat had finished.